| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL
Rating: 
USA. 1941.
Directors – John English & William Witney, Screenplay – Ronald Davidson, Norman S. Hall, Arch B. Heath, Joseph Poland & Sol Shor, Based on the Comic Book Created by C.C. Beck & Bill Parker, Photography (b&w) – William Nobles, Music – Cy Feuer. Production Company – Republic.
Cast:
Tom Tyler (Captain Marvel), Frank Coghlan Jr (Billy Batson), Louise Currie (Betty Wallace), William Benedict (Whitey), Robert Strange (Professor John Malcolm), Harry Worth (Professor Bentley), Bryant Washburn (Dr Henry Carlyle), John Davidson (Tal Chatali), George Pembroke (Dr Stephen Lang), Peter George Lynn (Dr Dwight Fisher)
Plot: In the Valley of the Tombs in Siam, the archaeological expedition of Professor John Malcolm uncovers the tomb of The Scorpion. Radio broadcaster Billy Batson is accompanying the group but decides to respect the warnings against all interlopers on the tomb. For his respect an ancient figure appears and bestows a gift on Billy – he has to merely say the word ‘Shazam’ and he will be transformed into the superhero Captain Marvel. The others uncover a golden scorpion with lenses that when arrayed can project a disintegrating ray or else transform metal into gold. It is decided that the discovery is too dangerous and so the lenses are distributed among the five scientists of the expedition for safekeeping. But back in the USA the masked villain known only as The Scorpion comes after the scientists to get the lenses. It is up to Billy, in the form of Captain Marvel, to stop The Scorpion and his men. But then Billy realizes that The Scorpion is really one of the five scientists.
Captain Marvel was always a ripoff of DC’s Superman. The Captain first appeared in Whiz Comics #2 in February 1940, only two years after Superman had premiered. The character’s unique spin was that he was always a young boy until he said the words Shazam, an anagram comprised of the names of the great heroes and gods – Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury – whose abilities and virtues he would then inherit. Unlike Superman, Captain Marvel’s writers didn’t take themselves very seriously – at one point Captain Marvel had a talking rabbit Hoppy as companion and was battling a world-conquering intergalactic villain that was finally revealed to be a worm. Captain Marvel was highly popular – there were various spinoffs such Captain Marvel Jr, The Marvel Family, with Hoppy even appearing in his own comics, and then this serial which was made only a year after the comic premiered. But in 1946 DC Comics decided to sue Fawcett Publications, alleging that Captain Marvel infringed the Superman copyright. A protracted legal battle began, ending with Fawcett deciding to cancel the Captain Marvel line in 1953. But in a bizarre turnaround DC then brought the rights to Captain Marvel and launched their own Captain Marvel line of comic-books between 1973-6 entitled Shazam (so as to avoid confusion with Marvel’s unrelated superhero series also entitled Captain Marvel). Captain Marvel later appeared in a live-action tv series, The Shazam/Isis Hour (1974-6) where he was played by John Bostwick in the first season and John Davey in the second.
Adventures of Captain Marvel is often spoken of as one of the best of all the serials. It’s not quite, or at least if it is that may say something about the impoverished quality and production values that most serials were made under. Certainly Captain Marvel is the most superheroic that serial superheroes were ever allowed to get. The film throws in a series of quite dynamically directed shots with Tom Tyler diving and forward-rolling into the action, which are combined with flying model shots and back-projected footage (most of which are repeated several times over throughout). Crucially though this Captain Marvel’s superherodom never extends much more than that – in one scene he rescues several people from a car that has gone off a bridge into the river but mundanely carries them out one at a time, whereas with any modern superhero you would expect him to lift the whole car out; in another scene he and Louise Currie are tied up on a bombing range and he merely carries her away to shelter behind a rock while the hut blows up behind them, instead of as one might imagine flying away to safety with her in his arms. This is the most superheroic that superheroes of the era ever got – a few jumps, a couple of back-projected flight scenes and maybe one instance of super-strength – not even the well-remembered The Adventures of Superman tv series (1953-8) rose above this imaginative impoverishment. There is the odd moment that raises some eyebrows today – in one scene Captain Marvel turns a machine-gun around and wipes out a horde of natives, in another he throws a villain off a rooftop. Certainly one quite decent aspect that the serial does is the alter ego, even if it is only a far less complex copy of the Superman/Clark Kent dichotomy. Frank Coghlan Jr makes a convincingly geekish and nasally ingenuous Billy, while the hawk-faced Tom Tyler makes a suitably intense and heroically profiled Captain Marvel.
There are some decent cliffhangers and death-traps – one where Captain Marvel is trapped on an electrified conveyor belt that is taking him toward a guillotine; a hidden panel that swings machine-guns into action to target interlopers; an excellent special effect with the hoods using the half-completed lens to melt the entire mountain; and a quite decently sustained sequence where the crew of a sinking ship are ferried to shore in a set of breeches. As with all serials there are aspects of the plot that are contrived – people deciding to have meetings at mines, Louise Currie racing off to try and trace the serial number of a truck, Billy deciding to fly to a meeting in his own plane – which are there for no other reason than to extend the plot and create cliffhangers. It all makes for a passably decent serial, but hardly a classic.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
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